You are a business owner interested in hiring a new employee to fill an essential opening in your company. After an extensive search, you narrow your choice of candidates down to two people.
The first person, Avery, has a high-performance ceiling. By this, I mean that when they are at their best, few people are better than Avery at what they do. However, in most situations, Avery can be considered somewhat of a slacker. Day in and day out, the level of performance they give you could be described at best, a little below average.
The second person, Jaime, is known for consistency. Jamie is the type of person that will give you pretty good results every time they show up for work. However, in clutch situations, Jaime struggles to provide you with any more than what they already give you daily. That is, when pushed to their limit, we find that Jaime’s upper potential is nowhere near what Avery is capable of producing.
If I were in this situation, I would hire Jaimie, however it depends on the industry and needs of the company. Overall, I would pick Jaimie. the reason I would pick Jaimie over Avery, is because I can count on her to deliver consistent results. This makes it easy to plan out workload and easily project where we will be in the future. This could for example make it easier for a company to make commitments for clients and give reasonable and accurate estimates for work.
A type of job where it would be better to hire someone with high potential with low consistency would be in a job with workload/ volume that has large fluctuations. Having someone like Avery in this type of job would allow the employee to ramp up production/ performance when needed. This would be useful because in very important situations, Avery can be counted on the make it happen, where someone like Jaimie would not be able to perform at a high level when we need it.
A type of job where it would be best to have someone like Jaimie would be a job that has a very consistent workload/ volume. Having a consistent workload for someone like Jaimie would be very good because the results, costs, and amount of time that it takes to take care of their tasks is always the same. If the inputs are consistent, then the results will be consistent. As I mentioned earlier, this would be advantageous for planning and estimating purposes.
